Karma

Thinking about karma today.

Last time, I talked to my Buddhist therapist, way back in April, we were doing the contemplation about the Four Reminders, he mentioned the last one: the inescapability of karma. Karma is, he said, how our actions affect our suffering. I said, “Oh, I have been meaning to talk to you about that.” And I had. I’d been thinking about how different religions deal with my kind of suffering. I actually recently had reread the Book of Job. But, in Buddhism, something never sat right with me and karma. Hell, I want to believe that if someone does a horrible thing, he or she will suffer eventually...but what if you are suddenly the one suffering? Now, with something like stillbirth or the death of your baby without any reason, I wanted to know, uh, you know, I mean, when I think about karma, with this kind of suffering, the bad-things-happen-to-good-people-type suffering, uh, this is awkward, but what I want to know is: do Buddhists think it is my own fault that my daughter died?

He said that traditional Buddhists might explain that in our past lives we were all kinds of people: thieves, mothers, butchers, farmers, murders, liars, monks, doctors, children, animals…He said a monk once told him that if we piled the bones of all the lives we have lived, it would reach through three universes. I may be going through this as a result of past karma from a life hundreds of years ago. I hated that answer. I mean, spit-on-the-floor hate that answer. Then he said, but the Buddha said not to take his words literally. He said to use his teaching to develop your own understanding of the universe. He asked me what I thought. What does karma mean to me now, as the mother of a dead baby?

I think the world is chaotic and random and often cruel. The death of my child had nothing to do with me—nothing I did, nothing my husband did, nothing my daughter did. She died. I can’t live thinking that Lucy’s death is my karma. The guilt of that interpretation would eat me from the inside out until I am nothing but a withered shell of a parent. There is no physical reason Lucy died, no medical reason, that is. I also don’t think there is a metaphysical reason.

But I think, spiritually, I have to figure out my reason to move forward. What I do have control over, and think has to do with my karma, is what I do with my experience of chaos and suffering in the world. This life, right now, is my choice. What am I going to do with this experience of loss?

Compassion. Fear. Love. Understanding. Grief. Sadness. Comfort. Kindness. Anger. Patience. Misplaced emotion. Mourning. Selfishness. Selflessness. If I toss each one, carefully peeled and scrubbed, into a blender (fingers safely tucked away from blades) and drink this past year down, I hope to emerge healthier. I hope this bitter juice with its subtle sweetness coating my throat helps me emerge more of those things I believe in. I control that part of me, the patient loving compassionate part, the part that experiences other people's suffering and loves. I sometimes feel very impatient. I sometimes feel very unloving and unlovable. I sometimes give into anger and throw pillows around my house. I write on here about the worst that life has thrown at me—death and loss and grief and suffering.

But through this year, I have seen the best humans have to offer. Truly. Someone wrote a comment on another blog about how negative babyloss blogs are, that people are stuck in their grief and it is unhealthy. And I just thought how narrow that was. How incredibly wrong. “The supportive, beautiful, unconditionally loving part of strangers, don’t you see that?" I wanted to scream. "Don't you read beyond the post? Don't you read what women, complete strangers on opposite ends of the world, write to each other through their own pain?”

That is all I see--compassion and love, not negativity. Send us your ugliest thoughts, and this group of suffering women will listen. In the most selfless way, they will embrace you and just say, "I know, sweetie, I know." The selfish post suddenly becomes selfless.

These women, all suffering and grieving, hold your hand, tell you you are normal, listen, and transform the ugly into love. For most of us, this little dusty corner of the internet is the only space where we can express our ugliness, anger, sadness and fear, but by speaking its name, I believe we transform our own karma. When I shake my fist at the world in anger, the comments on this blog give me patience. When I cry onto my computer screen, the comments sit there, embracing ((arms)) and listen. When I write of my selfish, self-absorbed, guilt-ridden feelings, the comments fill me with compassion towards myself. In these many small, tiny gestures of love, I think we all are transforming the world's karma. And so when I think of karma now, I think of this.

As I walked away from that session, he said one last thing just as I left his room. “And about Lucy’s karma, maybe Lucy fulfilled her karma by living her life just as she lived it.”

Maybe.